Letter: Another perspective of The Great War

Tuesday

Aug 5, 2014 at 3:04 PM

On July 28, 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia. This was followed within a few days by the Russian declaration of war on Austria-Hungary. Then Germany declared war on Russia. Germany did not wait for France, through treaty obligations to declare war on Austria-Hungary and her ally Germany, but declared war on France on August 3, 1914. The best route into France was through Belgium. The unprovoked German invasion of Belgium caused Great Britain, through treaty obligation to Belgium, to declare war on Germany on August 4, 1914. So within a week all the great powers of Europe were at war.

On July 28, 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia. This was followed within a few days by the Russian declaration of war on Austria-Hungary. Then Germany declared war on Russia. Germany did not wait for France, through treaty obligations to declare war on Austria-Hungary and her ally Germany, but declared war on France on August 3, 1914. The best route into France was through Belgium. The unprovoked German invasion of Belgium caused Great Britain, through treaty obligation to Belgium, to declare war on Germany on August 4, 1914. So within a week all the great powers of Europe were at war.

Never before or since have such vast armies marched and fought against each other. The Russians had five armies, each with 200,000 men to invade Austria-Hungary. The Austrians had four armies ready to invade Russia. The Germans had seven armies invading Belgium and France. The French had five armies to defend France and invade Germany. The Austrians invaded little Serbia with two armies. The Serbs only had three armies to defend the whole country.

Which meant that they could only meet the Austrian invasion with less than two armies, since they had to guard their eastern border from their Balkan neighbors. Yet the Serbs won the first clear cut victory of the war at the town of Sabac on August 19, 1914. They defeated the Austrian forces and drove them back into Austria.The Austrians committed numerous atrocities, including cold blooded murder in Serbia. Matter of fact, the Austrian atrocities in Serbia far exceeded those of the Germans in Belgium.

I bring up the Serbian theatre of the war, largely due to your recent guest opinion by Marvin J. Folkertsma in the Sunday Gazette of Aug. 3. He, like most other Americans, seem only to see the Great War through the Western Front perspective. But, like the Serbian battle zone there was a whole lot of fighting in other parts of the world. In eastern Europe the Jews would pray for the arrival of the German and Austrian armies. The cry “The Cossacks are coming” meant looting, pillaging and murder of the Jews in towns across eastern Europe. In Turkey the Great War meant the wholesale genocide of the Armenian people from 1915-1919. Over 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turks. The word genocide actually was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, writing in the 1940s to describe the plight of the Armenians in the Great War.

Barbara Tuchman, in “The Guns of August,” wrote a genuine classic history book, and probably one of the greatest works in the English language. But she, for personal and book size reasons totally omitted some of the events I mentioned above. I would recommend two great World War I histories published in 2014. One is “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire” by Geoffrey Wawro, published by Basic Books. The other is “Collision of Empires: The war on the Eastern Front in 1914,” written by Pritt Buttar, published by Osprey. Both of these books are very well written. They both describe in detail the war on Eastern Front and in the Balkans.